


white

by rahleighbucket



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, if reading about 9/11 upsets or triggers you then you may not want to read this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-11
Updated: 2013-08-11
Packaged: 2017-12-23 04:48:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/922172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rahleighbucket/pseuds/rahleighbucket
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"If emotions were colors, then his reaction to the monster rampaging through San Francisco was white."</p>
            </blockquote>





	white

Raleigh was too young to remember 9/11. Yancy only just remembered it, in the way that you knew you were supposed to remember something, so you sort of filled in the gaps of your memory of something based on what people had told you about it. Yancy had been in first grade, had just settled down for class before the teacher told them that something very bad had happened in New York. Raleigh had been a few months short of three, still at home, and hadn’t noticed when his mother had turned off the TV.

What Raleigh knew of the tragedy at the Twin Towers and the World Trade Center, he had been told. Alaska was far enough from New York that most people were affected by proxy, shocked but not shaken like people close by; there was about a handful of people from Anchorage in New York or the surrounding states. He sort of tacitly understood that it was horrible, that people honored the date, that they didn’t like talking about it. It was an event of such emotional magnitude that it was difficult to get a grip on.

It was really the only thing he could compare to August 10, 2013. It was a Saturday, and he and Yancy had been planning on sleeping in, but had been woken up by their mother just after seven in the morning telling them that a monster was attacking San Francisco. At first, Raleigh had assumed he was still dreaming, because honestly, a monster attacking San Francisco was exactly the kind of weird shit that people dreamt about. But when he’d dragged himself out of bed twenty minutes later (unable to fall back asleep), Yancy was already parked in front of the television, and lo and behold, a terrifying behemoth was wreaking mayhem in the city.

Watching it was sort of unreal. His cell phone was going off the hook with friends texting him, asking if he was seeing what was happening. He and Yancy sat in front of the TV for ages, gazing unbelievingly at the news coverage.

When you watched events like the San Francisco attack in real time, you never quite grasped right then and there just how much they were going to affect the world. You were too shocked at what was happening. It wasn’t until weeks, months, years later that you understood the significance, could actually process it. It was like that for Raleigh.

(The question for many people, for twelve years, had often been “where were you when the planes hit the towers?” After K-Day, the question universally was “where were you when the kaiju tore down the Golden Gate Bridge?”)

If asked, Raleigh couldn’t really say how he was feeling. It was sort of…numb. You knew you were supposed to be sad, horrified, angry at what was happening, at all the people who were dying, but it was almost like all of those emotions compounded until they negated each other and faded into an unfeeling white. It was the best way to describe it – if emotions were colors, then his reaction to the monster rampaging through San Francisco was white. He wasn’t _there_ , wasn’t watching the monster bear down on him or the buildings collapsing around him, so he couldn’t feel the terror that the citizens of San Francisco were surely feeling. He could only watch from two thousand miles away, feeling like he’d somehow been lied to, because _monsters were not real_. It was the understanding of monster movies, of horror movies, of fantasy movies, that the fantastical and terrifying creatures they brought forward existed only in the realm of fiction. And yet there was one destroying a city right now, right before his eyes. It was like the edges of reality were fraying and unraveling. He didn’t know what to do with that, so he watched until their mother came in and told them that they’d been watching for long enough and turned off the TV.

Three years later, he and Yancy signed up for the Ranger program. It was a somewhat impulse decision, dumb kids taking a dare, but a part of Raleigh remembered watching the news when he was fifteen, a little confused and a little scared, but mostly shocked into that emotional state of white, and deciding that he wasn’t going to let any other kids feel that, if he could do anything about.


End file.
